


Life Worth Living

by Valentine



Series: Canon Compliant Avengers Endgame Fics [3]
Category: Avengers: Endgame - Fandom, Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Adopted Natasha Romanov, Alternate Reality, Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Existential Angst, Existential Crisis, General Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross, Infinity Stones, Multi, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Steve plays fast and loose with the fate of the universe, Steve's Reality, Temporary Reality, Time Travel, Tony and Natasha as siblings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-30
Updated: 2019-04-30
Packaged: 2020-02-10 03:25:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18651910
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Valentine/pseuds/Valentine
Summary: Steve knows he's being selfish by playing with the fate of the universe for his own happiness.  It doesn't stop him.  He gets more than seventy years of joy, pain, and existential angst.





	Life Worth Living

He spends a lot of time at church the first few months. Peggy thinks she understands why and he doesn’t correct her. He’s not on his knees giving thanks or offering prayers for the departed. He’s asking forgiveness: forgiveness for playing god, for being selfish, for creating a whole reality because he didn’t get the happy ending he wants. He knows it’s wrong. Knows it down to his marrow, but he also knows himself well enough to know that being wrong won’t stop him.

He’d gone back a few months before he’d put the plane down in the ice. He had no intention of stopping that from happening. He wasn’t trying to give another version of himself a happy ending. No, he was there to save Bucky. He’s set up safe houses and cached supplies between the approximate location of Bucky’s fall and into Switzerland. He needs to be as prepared as possible. He doesn’t have unlimited Pym particles and he’s determined to keep at least one promise which means he has to save enough for the final trip to return the stone and go back to his original reality.

His plan is a success. He picks Bucky up and carries him away, and by the time a Russian patrol reaches the area there aren’t even footprints left in the falling snow. If they’d dug they might have found some blood, but there was no reason to. James Buchanan Barnes would never be the Winter Soldier.

He waits out the end of the war in Switzerland and contacts Peggy when it’s over to remind her about their date. She and Howard meet him with a private plane. He explains his presence by explaining that the Tesseract had transported him back to where Bucky fell after presumably transporting the Red Skull somewhere else. He mentions it showed him things, flashes of possibilities he didn’t understand. He doesn’t feel bad for lying to his friends. He needs a way to have knowledge he shouldn’t have without bringing up time travel.

His worse fear is having to explain to anyone that their lives, their entire reality is a bubble that he has to end so that another reality can continue. He comforts himself with the idea that these people will have better lives and better futures than they would have if he didn’t interfere. It doesn’t help him sleep.

When SHIELD is formed he’s able to use the Red Skull still being unaccounted for to successfully argue against Arnim Zola’s inclusion in the program. Over the years he successfully and unsuccessfully guides the world in ways small and large, and the farther he gets from the date he arrived the less he thinks about it. This world is real no matter how long it lasts. It's real even though he's the only one who will survive its ending.

That changes when Anthony Edward Stark is born. Howard asks him and Peggy to be godparents and Peggy dotes on the boy the way he knows she longs to do with children of her own. He cannot bring children into this world, children who would cease to exist the moment he returns the stone. He starts having trouble sleeping again and goes back to spending those sleeplessness nights in a quiet cathedral until he can convince himself again that as long as he remembers this world it is real.

He remembers snippets of things Tony said or insinuated about his childhood and assuages his conscience by making sure this time is better. Howard is a much more present father with no Steve to search for and a friend who steers him away from drinking. Steve even encourages him to be more verbally effusive with his son. He sobs when Tony calls him Uncle Steve before the boy is even a year old but as much as the boy loves him and Peggy, Bucky is Tony’s favorite. When he’s two he announces he’s going to build Bucky a better arm and an indulgent Howard gives him the materials he asks for. When he’s six he does it. 

Howard hired Bucky as a bodyguard and security expert after he healed up. He was officially assigned to Tony when Tony was born. Tony adores him. He follows him around imitating his walk and stance, he even has a fairly convincing Brooklyn accent he trots out when he’s trying to persuade Bucky to indulge him in some scheme. Fortunately he doesn’t know that he doesn’t need tricks. He has Bucky wrapped around his little finger along with his parents, godparents, and the Jarvis’s. 

Steve spends a lot of time at the Starks. He leaves for missions for days or weeks at a time, but he always comes back and the missions are spread far apart. One of his continuing missions is the eradication of the Red Room, the Soviet program responsible for the creation of the Black Widows. He left his reality armed with as much information as he could dig up on Natasha’s origins based on Clint’s knowledge of her father’s name and the leaked SHIELD files.

When Tony is ten his parents adopt a daughter. Steve comes back from a SHIELD mission with a bald-headed infant in tow. Her name becomes Natasha Stark, formerly Natasha Romanov, and Tony loves her with an intensity that doesn’t surprise Steve. Tony has always thrown his whole heart into what he loves, and he’s happy to see that he can do that with family. The Jarvis’s become Natasha’s godparents. Tony learns Russian and half a dozen other Slavic languages before Natasha is old enough to do more than babble. He tells his parents that she’s theirs now, but he wants her to understand where she came from. Steve cries alongside Maria.

Steve had considered adopting Natasha himself. He’s sixty-six but with the body of someone thirty years younger. Howard had invented a device that made him appear closer to the age he would look if he wasn’t enhanced. Peggy looks her age, but she is still the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen. He knew if he asked about keeping Natasha that she’d say yes. Hell, Howard was older than both of them. 

He’d thought long and hard about it, but in the end he decided she would be better off with parents who didn’t have any preconceived ideas about what kind of person she could become. He wasn’t sure he could look at baby Natasha without seeing the shadow of a dead friend. He can’t at first, but by the time she’s waddling around on chubby legs he sees her as Natasha Stark. He has a panic attack the day it sinks in that she’ll never reach thirty. He reminds himself that she was only thirty-eight before. 

By December 21, 1991, there have been three attempted assignation attempts on members of the Stark family. Bucky has taken four bullets for Starks and another one for Edwin Jarvis. Tony develops increasingly sophisticated body armor after each attack. There are more than a dozen attempted kidnappings of the children and three successful ones. Two Bucky and Steve rescue Tony from and one that thirteen year-old Tony rescues himself and his sister from. For months after Steve or Bucky sit with Tony during sleepless nights as he struggles to come to terms with taking the lives of other human beings. Steve knows that in at least one of the earlier two kidnappings Tony could have escaped if he’d been willing to kill his captors, but that’s Tony for you capable of doing nearly anything to protect others but not willing to do the same when he’s the only one at stake.

Tony never leaves for boarding school but when he’s fourteen the entire family moves to Boston so that he can live at home while he attends MIT. By the end of his first semester the Starks gain another family member as Rhodey practically moves in with them. Five year old Natasha sees in another big brother to do her bidding and it’s a common sight to see her riding on his shoulders as they both follow Tony around.

Hank Pym with the help of Tony and Howard retrieves his wife from the quantum realm a year after she disappeared. During that year he and Hope move in with the Starks. Hope and Tony developed a friendship/rivalry that is the cause of laughter, tears, and more than a few explosions. They refer to themselves as siblings at every opportunity. Until the day Hank died he and Howard had the most antagonistic friendship Steve has ever seen but they seem to enjoy the yelling so Steve never ties to interfere.

Natasha takes dance lessons and Tony submits papers to academic journals and both of them are so, so loved. Things aren’t perfect, nothing real ever is, and Steve reminds himself again and again that just because he’ll be the only one to remember this reality it doesn’t mean it isn’t real that it doesn’t matter. In 1990 he manages to get a message to King T’Chaka. It’s about a newborn member of the Wakandan Royal family and a warning of what the future might hold if he leaves his brother and new nephew outside of Wakanda. Two years later he’s gifted just enough Vibrainum to recreate his shield. He asks Tony to make it. Tony suggests Howard but when Steve insists he creates it for him.

Tony graduates at seventeen at nineteen at twenty at twenty-one and on. Tony stops telling his family about his graduations after the first two. Steve doesn’t miss a single one. By twenty-four Tony has his own multi-million dollar company, Stark Resilient, specializing in medical and consumer technology. Steve introduces him to Bruce Banner before the Hulk incident. They become fast friends, but Bruce with the arrogance of one older and secure in his intelligence declines Tony’s offer of help with his project. He becomes the Hulk and this time his girlfriend Betty Ross becomes the She-Hulk. At least her father, General Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross is more restrained with his daughter involved.

When Natasha is twenty-two and the principle ballerina of the American Ballet Theater she meets Clinton Francis Barton, newly minted agent of SHIELD. It takes her five minutes to ask him on a date. It takes significantly longer for Howard, Maria, Peggy, Bucky, Jarvis, and Tony to individually threaten him. Steve offers him a beer when they’re done with him and welcomes him to the family.

The years fly by, moving faster and faster and Steve tries to hold on to the slow parts: Peggy in his arms, watching Natasha dance, and listening to Tony’s unending optimism about the future. The countdown is always in his head no matter how hard he tries to ignore it. He has to leave before he’s dug out of the ice and needs to explain that he’s from another reality. He thinks that it’ll be kinder than telling the truth so that he can stay longer. He’ll be ninety-three and will have nearly seventy years in this reality and that is far more than he deserves.

Tony Stark still becomes Iron Man with an arc reactor in his chest. He starts a super-hero team with Bucky Barnes, Rhodey, Bruce and Betty Banner, Clint Barton, Hope van Dyne, Scott Lang, and Sam Wilson. They all love and fear Natasha which both Tony and Natasha will tell you is the natural order of things. Tony and Hope co-lead the team. They have a base in upstate New York and a tower in Manhattan. Tony creates an independent organization to oversee the Avengers that reports to both the US government and the UN but takes orders from neither. He asks for guidance from Steve, the Uncle he’s known his entire life throughout the entire process. He funds much of the expenses of the team although the Pym/van Dynes contribute a good chunk.

In 2011 Peggy needs to go into care. He can’t keep her home and still leave in a few months. He visits every day. Edwin and Anna Jarvis passed a few years ago, but Howard is still kicking at ninety-seven. Maria is as active as ever even as she relies more and more on a wheelchair specially designed by her son. Bucky is nearing ninety-five and looks forty. He never bothered to hide his lack of aging, but he never had a significant other who aged at a different rate. Steve knew why he never dated, but it was another painful truth he didn’t look at too closely. Peggy wasn’t a woman who shared.

He says goodbye to those he loves without actually saying goodbye and is pleased that he’s acquired some stealth in his many years as none of them seem to suspect. He thinks that until he comes home one day to two young adults lounging in his kitchen eating all his snacks. He doesn’t tell them what he’s about to do, but he knows that between Natasha and Tony he’s going to be constantly surveilled until he pops away. They won’t be able to stop him, and a large part of him wishes they could.

Natasha is still dating Clint years after he would have married Laura and started having children. Tony has dated and broken up with Pepper twice. They both swore the last time was it. They’re still friends. Pepper is even friends with his new girlfriend, May Parker. Tony met her through his companies school outreach program when her nephew won their science fair contest. She’s a widow whose husband was killed in the Hammer Industries Expo tragedy two years ago. 

At midnight on December 31, 2011 while Natasha is dipping Clint and Tony is kissing May on the cheek while her nephew Peter is tucked under his arm Steve takes one last look around and activates his time travel device. He takes with him the clothes on his back, his new shield, and a flash drive with terabytes full of memories. 

Afterwards, when Sam has left with his new title and shield and Bruce has packed up his equipment and taken it inside, he walks up to Bucky and lets the disguise fall. He’s visibly aged maybe ten years in nearly eighty. He falls into Bucky’s arms and cries. Later they’ll talk. Later they’ll curl up in one bed the way they used to when he was small and the room was cold. Later he’ll tell him everything. But for now he lets himself be held and he cries. The penalty for playing god was the death of all he created by his own hand. And from another life he hears a voice, “Was it worth it?”

**Author's Note:**

> To make Tony and Natasha’s ages closer together I moved Tony’s birthday to 1974. In some versions of canon he’s seventeen when his parents die in 1991 so I figured it’s not too much of a stretch.


End file.
